The exemplary embodiments are directed to a method and system for near unity scaling of printer video data. More specifically, the exemplary embodiments are directed to a method and a system for applying permuted anti-aliasing rendering screens as a function of past scaling.
Where continuous tone imagery contains an infinite range of colors or grays, the halftone process reduces visual reproductions to a binary image that is printed with only one color of ink. This binary reproduction relies on a basic optical illusion—that these tiny halftone dots are blended into smooth tones by the human eye.
All halftoning uses a high frequency/low frequency dichotomy. Digital halftoning uses a raster image or bitmap within which each monochrome picture element or pixel may be on or off, ink or no ink. To emulate an input base pixel cell, a scaled digital halftone output pixel must contain groups of monochrome subpixels within the same-sized cell area. The fixed location and size of these monochrome pixels includes the high frequency/low frequency dichotomy of the halftone method. Clustered multi-pixel dots cannot “grow” incrementally but in jumps of one whole pixel. Additionally, the placement of that pixel is slightly off-center. In other words, the input and output pixel grids may become misaligned after scaling. Due to this misalignment, anti-aliasing rendering may produce jagged edges and/or satellite pixels when applied to gray edges, thereby resulting in significant image quality degradation.